Without them the direction and the scale of shift would be imperceptible.Ĭulture drifts like polar ice. There is a line of markers for previous years that trace the movement of the ice over time. The ice sheet at the Pole drifts by about ten metres each year, and so a new marker is placed in the true position each New Year’s Day. There is an annual ceremony in Antarctica to replace the steel post that marks the position of the geographic south pole. But it is a time capsule nonetheless, not of musical style but of cultural permissiveness. Relax has aged well, better than a lot of popular music of its time. The memorability and repetition of the lyrics, coupled with your awareness that your relationship with the song is part of a mass, popular consciousness, make it inevitable that many of your brain’s neural network associations for the word RELAX will relate to this song and this band. If you’ve heard the song, Frankie have captured your imagination, literally so, in a neuroscientific way. They overcommitted to every idea they ever had, be it war, love, pleasure, or sex & horror.Īnd Frankie own (not owns) the broad, generic, single-word concept of RELAX. Most brands lack the zeal that the ownership of an idea requires.įrankie surfeited on zeal.
And they don’t commit to a single idea over time. They don’t commit to ideas that cut through. We are the comfort fucking masters.’īrands lack the necessary arrogance and aggression. ‘See how every brand in this market is selling comfort? Well, fuck them with an uncomfortable sharp stick. Ownership takes chutzpah and hubris, which most brands don’t have. But such success stories are exceptional. Perhaps, back in the day, Heineken could justifiably claim to ‘own’ refreshment.
Persil would love to ‘own’ whiteness for instance. These motivating ideas tend to be broad, generic and captured by a single word - togetherness, family, softness, strength and so on. This means that, in the minds of consumers, a brand is indelibly and irreplaceably associated with the most powerful motivating idea for its audience. It is a fashionable fantasy in the advertising industry to talk about a brand ‘owning’ the conceptual territory that defines its market.
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